Fatal Frame

Fatal Frame is a suffocating, feverish nightmare of a game. Employing a mix of jump-out-of-your-seat frights and an atmosphere of oppressive, cold dread, Fatal Frame is relentlessly tormenting.

Armed only with a camera and trapped in a haunted Japanese mansion, you must uncover the house’s morbid secret and put to rest the dense ecology of spirits that dwell within. Inside Himuro mansion, no place is safe, morning never comes, and you are completely alone in the inky darkness. Finishing the game brings the same feeling of relief that comes after waking from an awful nightmare and realizing that it was, after all, just a dream.

On the surface, game play and control stick fairly close to survival horror standards. Exploration is from a third person point of view and during ghost encounters you switch to a first person view through the camera lens finder. Combat with the spooks involves capturing their soul energy on film by snapping a picture. There are also numerous puzzles and strange secrets to decipher although none of these are terribly difficult to solve. Unfortunately, like so many other survival horror games, Fatal Frame will run you around a great deal and many locations in the mansion are visited more than once.

Where Fatal Frame completely succeeds is in capturing the claustrophobic and confusing logic of nightmares. Nameless things lurk just out of sight in the sepia toned gloom of the decaying mansion. Long hallways echo with disembodied voices and demonic whispering. In the background, music suitable for the charnel house or ritual murder pulses quietly. Just as western works of horror frequently twist Christian images for scary effect, the Buddhist and Shinto background of Fatal Frame provides a deep well of unsettling and macabre imagery. The ghosts are grotesquely deformed souls that will gnaw at the edges of you sanity. Fatal Frame is a game suffused with creeping menace and panicked fear.

Sony Playstation 2
Tecmo
2002

game review by Jeffrey Fleming, 2002